Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.
Kahlil Gibran

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
Charles Darwin

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.
William James

Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.
Norman Vincent Peale

Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood.
Heinrich Heine

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
William James

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied…but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
John Berger

My poverty is not complete: it lacks me.
Antonio Porchia

We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don’t want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential.
Barack Obama

Seldom do people discern
Eloquence under a threadbare cloak.
Juvenal

Every man has a right to be poor.
Richard Jefferies

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.
Bill Vaughan

We didn’t starve, but we didn’t eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was.
Bernard Malamud

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.
W.C. Fields

The poor are poor because the rich are rich.

Society comprises two classes: those who have more food than appetite, and those who have more appetite than food.
S�bastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.
Eli Khamarov

Affluence creates poverty.
Marshall McLuhan

You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
P.J. O’Rourke

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving.
O. Henry

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
Willem de Kooning

Hunger makes a thief of any man.
Pearl S. Buck

Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
Sydney Smith

Poverty is the mother of crime.
Marcus Aurelius

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.
Barack Obama

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
Mahatma Gandhi

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all.
Eva Per�n

Who, being loved, is poor?
Oscar Wilde

To a man with an empty stomach food is God.
Mahatma Gandhi

It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.
Mother Teresa

Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow.
Barack Obama

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa

The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.
Mother Teresa

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
Bill Cosby

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.
Mother Teresa

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.
Groucho Marx

Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.
Mother Teresa

It’s God’s will for you to live in prosperity instead of poverty. It’s God’s will for you to pay your bills and not be in debt.
Joel Osteen

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.
Mother Teresa

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
Henry Ford

I asked God for strength that I might achieve. I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey. I asked for health that I might do greater things. I was given infirmity that I might do better things. I asked for riches that I might be happy. I was given poverty that I might be wise. I asked for power that I might have the praise of men. I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God. I asked for all things that I might enjoy life. I was given life that I might enjoy all things. I got nothing that I asked for, but everything I hoped for. Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered. I am, among all men, most richly blessed.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
Mother Teresa

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.
Kahlil Gibran

You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
P. J. O’Rourke

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.
John F. Kennedy

The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.
Mother Teresa

Poverty is the worst form of violence.
Mohandas Gandhi

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John Gardner

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Henry David Thoreau

As in the rankest soil the most beautiful flowers are grown, so in the dark soil of poverty the choicest flowers of humanity have developed and bloomed.
James Allen

By the time this concert ends this evening, 30,000 Africans will have died because of extreme poverty. By this time tomorrow evening, another 30,000. This does not make sense.
Brad Pitt

The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.
Adam Smith

He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.
Victor Hugo

Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance.
Kofi Annan

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Poverty is unnecessary.
Muhammad Yunus

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
Robert Kennedy

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
H. L. Mencken

What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts are beating with a consciousness of untold riches of the head and heart?
Orison Swett Marden

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.
Lyndon B. Johnson

Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.
James A. Garfield

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.
Lyndon B. Johnson

Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world.
Kofi Annan

If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.
Simone Weil

Whoever cultivates the golden mean avoids both the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.
Horace

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.
Lyndon B. Johnson

The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.
Jeremy Rifkin

Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that’s where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.
Paul Farmer

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as “Soho” poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
Quentin Crisp

Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.
William Shakespeare